Today's the Day: The Cursed Treasure of the Atocha

In September 1622, a Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Señora de Atocha left Havana carrying so much gold and silver that it took three days to load. There were more than 260 people on board. The fleet was already behind schedule — hurricane season was well underway, and the captains knew it.

They sailed anyway.

They lasted one day.

The storm that hit on September 6th was the kind the Caribbean reserves for ships carrying too much weight and not enough luck. Of the twenty-eight vessels in the fleet, eight sank. The Atocha went down in fifty-five feet of water near what is now the Florida Keys, taking its treasure — and all but five of the people on board — with it to the bottom. The survivors clung to the mizzenmast as the ship went under. They were found days later, half-mad from sun and salt and whatever they'd seen.

The Spanish knew exactly where she went down. They found the mast still poking above the water almost immediately and sent divers to recover what they could. But the sea wasn't finished. A second hurricane struck in October 1622, broke the wreck apart, and scattered forty tons of silver and gold across miles of ocean floor. The wood rotted. The sand shifted. The Atocha disappeared — not just from sight, but from the map entirely. Three and a half centuries of storms and silence buried it so completely that it might as well have never existed.

It would stay that way for 363 years.

In 1969, a man named Mel Fisher decided the Atocha belonged to him. This was not a man with a casual relationship to obsession. He'd already found another Spanish treasure wreck, the Santa Margarita, which would have been enough for most people. It wasn't enough for Mel Fisher. He moved his family to Key West, started a company called Treasure Salvors, and began searching the Florida Straits with a single-mindedness that could charitably be called determination and less charitably be called madness. Every morning, no matter what had happened the day before, he told his crew the same three words: Today's the day.

Some days were not the day. Most days were not the day. Sixteen years' worth of days were not the day.

In July 1975, one of those days killed his son Dirk, Dirk's wife Angel, and a fellow diver when their search vessel sank in the night. Dirk had found a bronze cannon that afternoon. The crew celebrated — they were convinced they were close. They were. They just didn't live to find out how close.

Mel Fisher kept searching.

On July 20, 1985 — ten years to the day after Dirk died — his son Kane radioed in from the water. He'd found it. Not a stray coin, not another teasing artifact. The main pile. The mother lode. Forty tons of silver bars, gold bars, and chains, Colombian emeralds the size of thumbnails, jeweled swords, copper ingots, and the personal belongings of more than two hundred and sixty people who never made it home. All of it sealed in the anaerobic mud of the Florida seafloor, perfectly preserved, waiting for someone stubborn enough to come looking.

The treasure was eventually valued at over $400 million. Florida and the federal government both tried to claim it. Fisher fought them through the courts for years — and won. It was his.

The legendary Mel Fisher died in 1998. He got the gold, he beat the government, and for thirteen years, every day was the day...

The Atocha's treasure is still being recovered today. Artifacts continue to surface. What else is still down there, buried in those shifting sands in fifty-five feet of dark water, no one knows for certain.

That's the thing about the Atocha. After four hundred years, it still hasn't given everything back.